Cost-Efficient Scheduling of Elastic Processes in Hybrid Clouds

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly important for executing business processes. This development contributes to a novel class of Business Process Management Systems, called eBPMS, that inherit elasticity from cloud computing. The aim of eBPMS is to improve the efficiency of process enactment, in particular regarding scalability and cost-efficiency. However, there is hardly any research that investigates scheduling for eBPMS so far. Against this background, we design an elastic scheduling approach for eBPMS and a corresponding formal problem definition in order to evaluate its data transfer capabilities -- this is especially important for hybrid cloud environments. Through extensive evaluations, we are able to show that our approach reduces the total cost by a considerable share.